Retail + Digital

Tag Archives: technology

I’ve been bigging up the importance of virtual retail for some time, so it’s great to see Westfield embracing the notion with its latest Future Fashion phygital installation taking place this week and next, at the White City and Stratford London shopping centre locations.

Future Fashion at Westfield, London

The VR experience is courtesy of digital specialists Inition (the team behind Topshop’s virtual LFW show experience in February 2014), and allows visitors to the designated Future Fashion area, to try out the spring/summer 15 fashion themed virtual worlds created especially for Westfield. Users can try on the Oculus Rift headsets and immerse themselves in a denim hued or floral world that twists and turns as users gesture with their hands forwards, backwards or left to right.

Future Fashion at Westfield, London

‘Consumers are more tech savvy than ever before, a third of shoppers will walk out of a store that has no wifi,’ says Myf Ryan, marketing director for Westfield UK. ‘Digital is such an integrated part of people’s lives, it’s all about enhancing that digital shopping journey for our customers,’ she continues. ‘With the Future Fashion promotion we wanted to push the boundaries of how people interact with the latest technology. We know that 57% of our customers respond to interactive digital displays, so we wanted to make that aspect more fun and connect it back to our shopping app, Edit Me, where they can personalise that shopping visit. Westfield’s continued focus on digital is a key part of our experience strategy where services such as click and collect and online curation keep people coming back to our shopping centres,’ she says.

Future Fashion at Westfield, London

The Retail Planner verdict: The Future Fashion promotion is a highly phygital showcase for how VR might become more integrated into the future shopping experience. With these kind of experimental digital exercises coming out of the Westfiled Labs R&D department in San Francisco, the retailer is showing it is a phygital first company where digitizing the experience for customers is a key part of their engagement strategy.

Addition: Marketing Magazine has produced a great behind the scenes video of how Inition installed it all.

Retail design agency Dalziel & Pow has created a 2D manifestation of what emotional, playful interactivity in the retail space looks like.

Dalziel & Pow: The Future of Retail 3D wallpaper at Retail Expo 2015

To surprise and delight customers is a well-worn retail mantra, and to discover an entertaining and charming digital form of storytelling housed in a physical store format, was a delightful showcase idea by the retail design specialists at last week’s Retail Expo.

‘It’s a way to engage and capture the imagination of customers, while they browse in-store, says David Wright, marketing director for D&P. ‘It also helps brands tell their current stories in a playful way and the content can be tweaked and updated as promotions come and go,’ he says.

The Retail Planner verdict: This playful showcase of how D&P thinks and works is a compelling live demonstration that shows off the agency’s phygital credentials. It ticks boxes for both consumer behaviour and retail industry expertise.

Google has finally succumbed to the allure of phygital retail. The tech giant has opened its first permanent bricks and mortar location in collaboration with Currys PC World.

Google Shop at Dixons Carphone Warehouse

Actually it’s more of a shop-in-shop but the Google space has a focus on one-to-one sales, that will make its first physical shop special for its tuition-based, experiential appeal. The ‘interactive doodle wall’ is a fun and entertaining pull, where visitors can use digital spray cans to get creative on a personal mural; there is also the multiple-screened Portal attraction, where users can transport themselves anywhere in the world via a quick aerial flight on Google Earth. There are of course plenty of Chromebooks, Chromecasts and Android phones and tablets to play with, as well as smart watches to try on and test.

Retail Planner verdict: At last we have a blueprint for what Google Retail looks and feels like. It’s about time. The one-to-one interaction and focus on experience will sell Google’s hardware products to customers who prefer personal interaction Plus the educational element to the shop fit will win over future generations.

Not strictly retail but certainly an experience, the Samsung dinner at the Four Seasons hotel during Paris Fashion Week was solely aimed at techanistas or early adopter fashion bloggers, and coincided with the launch of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge mobile phone, just the week before at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona.

The fashion industry was invited to a runway show and ‘tasting dinner’, where the sleek new Galaxy S6 phone design credentials were unpacked in a suitably theatrical fashion (puffs of Co2 escaping from glass tumblers), alongside a desert tray of nibbles that were intended to mirror the choice of fashion accessories that accompany the phone. I wanted my phone to be like the miniature square short-crust biscuit with black and white chocolate topping – all compact and graphic packaging.

Samsung’s S6 Paris Fashion Week dinner

Then, after Younghee Lee, executive VP of Samsung global marketing and her design counterpart Hyanyeul Lee, VP of Samsung’s UX Innovation team talked the audience through the virtues of metal and glass for a seamless design, oh and the numerous selfie enhancements and FROW photography functionalities, an army of futuristic looking waiters delivered a wireless charger, clear casing and an actual phone to each attendee. Only then did we get to play around with the device for 10 minutes, while Jessica Stam walked up and down ‘modelling’ the phone. Samsung made the most of the assembled fashion industry and supermodels with plentiful photo opportunities and Samsung’s latest VR headsets served like the fashionable canapés (real dinner) on silver platters for guests to try out for themselves.

Samsung’s S6 Paris Fashion Week dinner

For more, read this fly on the wall report on Samsung Tomorrow’s blog.

The Retail Planner verdict: Fashion and technology are happy bedfellows in today’s fast-paced consumer electronics market. While Samsung is playing catch up to Apple in the luxury positioning stakes (with this event one month before the Apple Watch launch in April), the Galaxy S6 launch event was clever marketing with a social and digital agenda. It’s backed up by a credible partnership design strategy in the shape of its Forces of Fashion project that is a call to arms for the fashion industry to work with Samsung on future creative design collaborations and start a conversation. On that note, we can get just a tiny bit excited about the fact I was seated next to Alexander Wang’s right hand marketing woman.

Fashion and tech are now a forceful double act, inextricably linked in today’s digital consumer mindset, especially as the market for wearables gathers pace. So what will our wardrobes look like in 10 years? That was the question Grazia asked to celebrate its tenth anniversary, as part of the magazine’s #Grazia10 retrospective exhibition earlier this month.

The Future Closet installation by The Future Laboratory for #Grazia10

The ‘Future Closet’ installation was curated by The Future Laboratory and was on display as part of the Grazia10 event at London’s Getty Images Gallery, showcasing a range of innovative fashion, tech and luxury brands.

The Future Closet installation by The Future Laboratory for #Grazia10

‘We’ve seen some compelling new collaborations between technology and fashion brands who have developed devices that hide their high-tech interiors behind elegant facades,’ LS:N Global visual editor Hannah Robinson comments. ‘On the catwalk, fashion is embracing radical transparency, ethical luxury and co-opting state-of-the-art technical materials to add a sense of enchantment to apparel.’

Members of LS:N Global, Cute Circuit and London College of Fashion held a panel discussion last week to discuss what the future closet will look like and the brands to watch for future fashion innovations. Watch highlights here: Grazia10 Future of Fashion discussion

The Retail Planner verdict: Wearables are the future fashion opportunity that retailers need to watch. While innovation is slow and form or aesthetic appeal catches up with function, the principal of connected garments will be worth waiting for.

Beauty brands are going all out to gather consumer data via digital and interactive content platforms, designed to enhance an ever-personalised experience both in-store and online. From on-counter smart mirrors and face-mapping programmes, to apps that allow you to colour-match before you buy, the beauty industry is embracing a more intuitive, digital journey to purchase.

‘Digital is going to boost the business of beauty,’ L’Oreal chairman Jean-Paul Agon said in an interview with Bloomberg in Paris. ‘We think it’s going to change everything.’

Content-to-Commerce

As retailers launch their own content platforms and mimic traditional media channels, beauty brands are following suit. Over the last few months, we have seen some of the industry’s biggest names launch editorial platforms that serve to engage and inform consumers with 360 degree brand-centric content.

Sephora’s user curated Beauty Board

After Sephora created its own user-generated content site The Beauty Board, beauty conglomerates such as Estée Lauder and L’Oreal are creating online brand destinations, taking readers and their valuable data with them.

L’Oreal is the latest to talk about its online content initiative. The French beauty giant unpacked the business strategy behind its new content-to-commerce ‘luxury digital flagship’ (online) stores at the World Retail Congress (WRC) conference in Paris last month. According to Internet Retailing, a re-focused direct-to-consumer e-commerce strategy will help the beauty conglomerate boost its annual direct e-commerce revenues to €300m in 2016 from €250m.

‘It’s not the digital revolution it’s the customer journey evolution,’ Vincent Stuhlen, global head of digital at L’Oréal Luxe told the WRC audience at a breakfast briefing. Customers are choosing to shop on their devices wherever they are, L’Oreal is simply putting itself in the right place, he said.

‘Our digital flagship strategy places the customer at the heart of the shopping experience; we want them to explore our brands and have the ultimate journey of discovery. We are testing the shopability of our content all the time – ideally with the aim of allowing customers to buy in just one click,’ he explained.

For example the Lancôme site is a digital branded experience for consumers who are ‘influencers’. The content-commerce platform sells direct to customers; it’s editorial driven and the customer curates their own page. They can get rewards from purchases, are encouraged to personalise their page and share their choices on social media, Stuhlen said.

In the summer, Estée Lauder launched its biggest online content platform to date, The Estée Edit. The daily news and inspiration site features editorial from Estée Lauder spokespeople and industry collaborators such as French blogger, Garance Doré or model Joan Smalls. The content resembles a lifestyle magazine with posts across food, culture, music and fashion as well as business-led profiles of successful entrepreneurs. Celebrity guest posts work well on the site too. There have been spikes in readers following product reviews by Dore, or a three-day editorship by Smalls. There is a ‘shop the story’ section at the end of each article that links to Estée Lauder’s product-driven e-commerce site.

The Estee Edit with Kendall Jenner and Joan Smalls

This collaborative content-to-commerce strategy is a smart one for the brand. According to the L2 Digital IQ Index , Estée Lauder has the fourth largest e-commerce presence in the US, UK, France, and China combined (after Bobbi Brown, Clarins and Clinique).

The Estée Edit was created for readers to share content across social media and make the brand relevant in a digital world. ‘Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively and practice telling stories,’ Helane Crowell executive director of online global communications at Estée Lauder told the Business of Fashion. ‘Storytelling is essential for personal social channels and even more so for brands. All of these platforms bring us closer [to brands] and with this intimacy comes a desire for authenticity and access.’

Augmenting beauty

Back to L’Oreal and its digital push to engage with consumers. Coinciding with the Cannes Film Festival in May, the French giant launched its Makeup Genius App, as a way for its customers to try out more products on themselves, wherever they are via mobile and without even visiting a beauty counter.

L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app

The app utilizes the front facing camera on smartphones and through facial mapping technology, the app can augment a range of L’Oreal’s key seasonal colour products and spokesmodel’s key looks onto the users face. If a shopper is using the app at a L’Oreal counter there are also products that can be scanned to instantly test the virtual looks. The 3D virtual mirror works by mapping 64 facial points and can be seen from whatever angle the user tilts their head and in real time. L’Oreal harvests data from every Makeup Genius session and if users like their new look, they can both buy the items directly via the app’s built-in shopping cart and snap selfies to share across social media or reference when applying the products in real life.

‘The reason why we started it is we see the beauty consumer has changed in terms of what they actually want in a product and an experience,’ Guive Balooch, global director of L’Oreal’s Connected Beauty Incubator told the New York Times. ‘We are moving more and more toward service, personalization and customization.’

Sephora is usually ahead of the curve when it comes to trying out new technology in stores. In June the retailer partnered with Modiface to trial 3D facial-recognition mirrors in its Milan flagship that simulate how cosmetics products will look on a shopper’s face from multiple perspectives. Users tap a touchscreen display to try different colours and looks, then save the results for trying out at home or purchasing in-store.

Sephora’s virtual mirror by Modiface, Rome store

If augmenting beauty looks onto shoppers’ faces via ‘try-before-you-buy’ apps is becoming the norm, perhaps we are not far off a more creative, virtual approach. We might see consumers booking data-driven face-mapping sessions similar to that shown in this beauty video from Project Omote by Japanese artist Nobumichi Asai.

Not content with creating a suite of virtual make-over, anti-aging and photo-enhancing beauty apps, as well as working with Sephora, Modiface is going one step further with a new data-driven Beautiful Me app.

Beautiful Me app by Modiface

The app works in conjunction with users’ Facebook photos and scans 500 of their images to determine skin tone, then makes product recommendations. Instead of basic analysis of a single photo, the Beautiful Me app gives people a much more accurate description of their skin profile, through the combination of big data and machine-learning algorithms, says Miriam Pettinen, ModiFace director of partnerships and mobile strategy for Beautiful Me.

When you mix analytics-based algorithms with personal preferences you should get near-perfect product suggestions. That’s the strategy behind BeautyDNA a new subscription-based online matchmaking service similar to music or TV streaming services such as Pandora and Netflix.

Beauty DNA

‘BeautyDNA is a game changer in that it will evolve how women discover beauty products,’ said Adam Sandow, founder of the site. Dubbed ‘the Pandora of beauty’, the site uses analytics to match consumers with brands that match their skin or haircare needs. ‘It will empower women so that they aren’t making the same beauty mistakes time and time again. Imagine a warehouse full of thousands of products, it’s completely overwhelming. One person comes and hands you a box of the perfect products for you from that warehouse — that is BeautyDNA,’ he told Women’s Wear Daily.

After three years of supplying beauty junkies with samples via a monthly subscription, online retailer Birchbox decided to experiment with a physical store that opened this summer in New York. With over 300,000 regular customers the company had enough preferences data to merchandise the store with online bestsellers and chose to position products by category not brand. Birchbox joint-CEOs Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna told Fortune magazine, that visitors to the store have taken to inputting their personal data via an interactive screen to generate their own Birchbox product recommendations, which they can either buy in-store or create an account for their own instant subscription.

Birchbox New York flagship store

Clinique is the latest beauty brand to combine data-mining and store design with its new 700 sq ft pop-up retail concept called the Great Skin Lab. Billed as a digital experience that will guide consumers through a ‘day in the life of their skin’, the Covent Garden store houses interactive pods and a moisturising station, where shoppers answer a series of questions on their lifestyle to determine their future skincare needs. Along with fellow Estee-Lauder owned brand, Bobbi Brown and its personalised selling techniques at the new Studio flagship that has opened just next door, the area is fast becoming known as London’s Beauty Quarter.

Clinique Great Skin Lab store, Covent Garden

While consumers are still wary of brands using their data to advertise products at them, Unilever’s All Things Hair YouTube channel has done much to change that since it launched in late 2013. The dedicated hair channel features vloggers’ ‘how-to’ tutorials and was developed as a way to analyse consumer search data from Google or YouTube. Through mining the search data, vloggers create and deliver highly relevant content using products from the Unilever brand portfolio (Dove, Toni & Guy, V05). Described by Unilever as a way to predict the next hair trends, the channel now has more than 132,000 subscribers. When the campaign won an award at this year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival, Unilever CMO Keith Weed said: ‘The content is relevant, useful and authentic. It’s a really cool application of big data, based on what is actually big insights’.

Unilever’s All Things Hair Youtube channel

Through dedicated social platforms or augmented reality ‘try-before-you buy’ apps, beauty brands and retailers are able to mine consumer preferences then generate hyper-personalised product recommendations. As the beauty industry introduces ever more compelling reasons to harvest big data, it adds up to consumers getting more of what they want, how they want it and when they want it.